


Of Flight and Freedom

by Mertiya



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Wings, Can you see a theme emerging, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Rescue from Thangorodrim, Trust Kink, Wing Grooming, Wing Kink, Wingfic, and also during it, lbr russingon is always a walking pile of trust kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:54:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26289073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: No one can rescue Maedhros from his captivity on Thangorodrim, for by Melkor's power a massive thunderstorm arises whenever a flyer gets too close.  "Hold my beer," says Fingon.Or: the wing-fic version where Fingon rescues Maedhros himself.
Relationships: Fingon | Findekáno/Maedhros | Maitimo
Comments: 18
Kudos: 58





	1. Flight

**Author's Note:**

> It was supposed to be an excuse for wing-kink and it got a bit out of hand. It's still an excuse for wing-kink, but with quite a lot of setup. 
> 
> With thanks to various folks on discord for sparking this notion and in particular moiety, zomb, dulaku, and stubhub for letting me throw excerpts at them.

“Do you trust me?” Maitimo had asked, reaching out a hand. 

“Of course.” Despite the storm that had been howling about them and the fact that Maitimo had suggested they leave the relative safety of the rocky ledge where it had trapped them, Findekáno would never have thought of responding anything else. Trust had been a given.

Findekáno had never been a strong flier. Born early after a difficult labor, his wings had always been a little crooked, and it took years for the flight feathers to come in properly. He had been earthbound for almost ten full years longer than any of the rest of his siblings, nearly sixty years old when he took his maiden flight, standing at the very top of his family’s dwelling and looking down on the green fields below, trying not to let Turukáno and Irissë see that he was trembling.

Now he perched at the top of a dark, mostly leafless fir tree, staring up at the barren mountain above. Although the top nearly vanished into the forbidding clouds overhead, from here he could quite easily see the red-haired figure fixed to the side, his crimson wings canted at an unnatural angle, his form utterly exposed.

“Oh, Russo,” Fingon whispered miserably.

_Do you trust me?_ the memory of Maitimo’s voice asked again. It had mocked him as he stared across the white and frozen wastes of the Helcaraxë. But Fingon didn’t need to trust Maedhros for what he was about to do. He only had to trust himself.

“No,” his father had told him. “Absolutely not. We have sent soldiers to try—our strongest fliers, and none of them can come close to him. Celegorm could not reach him. You would have no chance, and I will not see you dashed against the rocks for Fëanor’s eldest—son.” Fingolfin had clearly barely restrained himself from using a significantly less complimentary turn of phrase.

Fingon shrugged. He hadn’t been trying to ask for permission to begin with; his father had overheard him asking one of the soldiers what they knew about the storm that arose whenever someone tried to reach Maedhros and had correctly interpreted the query for the request for information that it was. But Fingon didn’t care how furious and frightening the storm might be that swept up by Melkor’s command to keep the prisoner trapped from any who might desire to rescue him. He might not be the most talented flier, but that didn’t matter. If anything, Fingon considered, it meant that he was used to struggling. And he’d flown through a storm before, with Russo.

It had barely been his third flight. No one else had wanted to fly with him, too wobbly, too slow, too hesitant. But his cousin was patient, and he’d seen the way Fingon’s face slowly fell as everyone ran out to take to the skies and carelessly came up with some excuse to take him along. He’d offered. Fingon had accepted. They hadn’t expected the storm that came up and caught them right as they reached the cliffs by the ocean.

He looked up again and breathed a quick, silent prayer to Manwë. Then he spread his wings and took the time to adjust his flight feathers carefully. There was a slight headwind, which was good. He steadied himself, catching the wind with his wings, and then he dove. Light bodies and hollow bones the First Children might have, unlike the Second, but it wasn’t possible to take off without a high place to glide from. Well, Fëanor had probably invented something to do it, but Fingon didn’t know of a way, at least.

The wind was sharp and biting against his face and wings as he rose, but he bore it, eyes on the splash of red far above him. He didn’t have a choice. He was going to succeed. He circled slowly and cautiously upward—it was the smell that told him when the storm was rising. That sharp, bright smell hanging in the air. It had been the same all those years ago in Valinor.

Fingon braced himself, and the storm broke over him.

~

Maedhros smelled the storm rising, too, and he shut his eyes against the rising, unpleasant sensation of his heartbeat accelerating so rapidly it felt as if his heart were going to burst out of his chest. Storms meant one of two things: either someone was trying to reach him—unlikely, potentially traumatic when they inevitably failed—or Sauron was coming to torture him—highly unpleasant. And no matter how much Maedhros tried to stop it, his body reacted with the inescapable grip of physical terror.

He tried to center himself, searching for quiet thoughts in the middle of the maelstrom, but there was so little left to him, these days. He used to be able to call to mind sunny, quiet days in Valinor, but they had long since faded. He feared to look too much on his brothers or his friends, because Sauron would slip into his mind and wear their forms until he thought he would go mad from it. But the storm itself could help him call to mind a day so long ago it had almost passed from his memory, and if he did not think too much on his companion, perhaps he could keep enough away from Sauron to save himself.

So Maedhros thought of the naked terror of watching the rising stormhead (oh, he had not _known_ terror in those days, but it seemed fearful enough), and the way the wind shrieked, and the way the stones protected him and his companion only a little. He had known that they would have to take flight to reach safety, and he had known acutely how much his young companion depended on him. There were other memories—fragments, pieces. A lock of black hair, the tight warmth of a hand taking his. 

_Do you trust me?_

_Of course_.

The day after that storm, Fëanáro and Nolofinwë had had a particularly searing argument, and Maitimo had not seen Findekáno again for nearly a century. But he’d brought him home safely.

The wind shrieked in his ears. Icy water pounded against his naked flesh, each raindrop a pinprick of exquisite agony. He could not really open his eyes, but he could see the lightning even through his lids, illuminating the red veins just before the thunder crashed, and Maedhros didn’t bother not to scream at the way it shook his already painful body. He was far past shame by now. Besides, who could possibly hear him, in the midst of all of this?

Hands on his shoulders jolted his eyes open, and he couldn’t keep back a sob. He’d failed, then, to keep even this sacred from Sauron. Findekáno’s determined grey eyes stared into his, his jaw set in just the way Maedhros remembered it, the way he had seen it last. The phantom Findekáno’s lips moved, but Maedhros couldn’t parse what he was saying, and he had to shake his head. Findekáno’s face pinched, and he ran his fingers along Maedhros’s right wing, but Maedhros could barely feel them.

He could feel them when Findekáno—Findekáno’s shadow—put them on the raw, oversensitive skin of his face and tipped his face up, three blinding-hot points of pain. It looked as if Findekáno was still trying to say something. Maedhros shook his head. He wanted so badly for this to be real. _I love you, Finno_ , he said, desperately, inaudible over the storm, and then he realized what his cousin was trying to say.

_Do you trust me?_

If the storm hadn’t been almost blinding him, his tears would have. He wished he wasn’t still able to cry. But it seemed even this was to be opened up to his enemy, and yet he could not bring himself to treat it that way. It would hurt. It would hurt more than anything had hurt yet, but it didn’t matter. A lie, a trick, a shadow—he could not respond any other way. _Always_.

A short, sharp nod. Findekáno’s figure slid upwards, and Maedhros shut his eyes hopelessly. _I love you, I love you, I love you, and I never told you._ The ice had cut them in half before he could, and now he could only reach the ghost of his memories of Finno in his mind.

The expected pain finally started, muted and far away, in his upper wing. It was still enough to make him scream, but he was surprised that Sauron would go for somewhere that was already partially numb, instead of attacking him in one of the oversensitive areas of his main body. It didn’t matter, Maedhros told himself. Endure. Endure. Endure…

His body dropped sickeningly downwards half a foot, and then there were hands underneath his shoulders, Findekáno’s voice echoing in his ears, “Hold on, Russo, it’s going to get a little bumpy.”

“What—”

He was falling. They were falling. The cliff face was receding above him, and pinned onto it was a chunk of feathers with a jagged shard of bloodied bone protruding from it. They were falling away, and the storm howled and screamed about them, and Findekáno’s arms still held him and did not vanish.

~

They were on the last thirty feet of cloud cover or so when Fingon felt the hair on the back of neck standing up, and the sharp smell in the air intensified. Maedhros’s eyes flew open, and he cried out. Fingon remembered this: history repeating itself. But he wasn’t as skilled as Maedhros had been, and Maedhros was much larger than Fingon had been. He couldn’t expect to do anything fancy.

He didn’t take time to breathe or think further; he just furled his wings and dove as the lightning forked towards them. Wind howled past both of them, and the clouds seemed to boil around them. If the clouds had gotten lower, Fingon thought distractedly, they might simply dive directly into the ground. And could he _possibly_ pull both of them out of the dive at this speed? He had to. He _had_ to.

He burst from the bottom of the clouds to see the green earth spiraling madly beneath them. _Shut everything out but me,_ Maedhros had said. _Ignore the rest_. Not much use now. Not much time, either. Fingon gritted his teeth, clutched at Maedhros, and unfolded his wings, trying to catch the wind without doing it so fast that he snapped the fragile, hollow bones.

He _just about_ managed it. They were still going too fast when they hit the trees, and Fingon swore as branches whipped at his face and shoulders, doing his best to shield Maedhros from the brunt of it. Something slammed into his shoulder, and he yelled in pain, juddered, and dropped another ten feet, just managing to fold his wings in again before they were both snapped on tree trunks. The two of them went down in free fall for the last unpleasant chunk, and Fingon tried to curl himself around Maedhros, even though he was too small to cover the other Elf really effectively.

_Bump—crash—thump!_

They came to a halt in an unpleasant tangle of limbs and wings at the base of a particularly large pine tree. For a long moment, Fingon just lay dazedly. Little spurts of pain ran through his shuddering wings. Slowly, he pulled himself upright. “Russo,” he croaked. “Russo—art thou alive?”

The bundle of bloody feathers lying half in his lap shifted a little, and he heard the sound of Maedhros’s stentorian breathing roughen even more, rising above the relentless pattering of the rain on leaves. There was blood spattered on the ground and blood oozing sluggishly from the ragged stump of his right wing. But he was breathing. Fingon himself took a deep breath. All right. Step one of the impossible plan: complete. Step two: get Russo back to his father’s encampment would be annoying, but as long as he could make sure that he didn’t die on the way, that was just some walking. Step three: prevent father from throwing out Fëanor’s eldest son was probably going to be the most difficult, Fingon considered.

“Well,” he said, letting his head thump back against the trunk of the tree. “Better get going.”

~

Everything hurt. This was not particularly surprising or unexpected. What _was_ surprising and unexpected was that the vision had gone on for so long. Never before had Sauron been able to produce something so intricate and detailed that had lasted for this amount of time. The only thing that didn’t match was the tingling pain in his right wing, which was actually hurting _more_ than it had in a long, long time.

Wearily, Maedhros put up a hand and scrubbed at his face, trying to wake himself up. He went back through the memories, trying to find what didn’t match, the telltale scorchmarks of Sauron’s touch. He remembered grey rain and black thunderclouds, remembered Fingon’s dear grey eyes gazing into his. Air and flight and a taste of freedom; then more pain. Then…he drifted in and out of thoughts of greenery and motion and—Findekáno’s arms about him.

He turned his face into what seemed to be the pillow and sobbed heavily, sick with longing. If only it could be real. If only he could have seen Finno just once more, just to tell him that he was sorry, that he loved him.

“Russo—you’re awake! How are you feeling?” Oh no—oh _no._ Whatever Sauron had done, his head was clearer now, and it sounded exactly like Findekáno, right down to the inflection. 

“Please,” Maedhros whispered. He knew he had broken already. He did not know how long ago it was that he had last said this. “Please, I’ll tell you anything, just—don’t pretend he’s here. _Please_ , I can’t bear it, I—”

Findekáno made a soft noise. A hand seemed to brush across the top of his left wing. “Russo,” Findekáno said very quietly, “you’re safe now. You aren’t in Angband any longer.”

Maedhros buried his face in the pillow. “ _Please_.”

He felt Findekáno’s—or someone’s—weight depressing the bed beneath him. “What would you say to Finno if he were here, then?” Finno’s voice asked, light but strained.

It was to be like this, then. Maedhros bit down hard on his hand, hard enough to feel the stinging pain, to draw blood. Why wasn’t even _that_ enough to wake him up? Fine. He gave up. He might as well take what crumbs of comfort he could, while he could. “I would—say that I was sorry,” he said in a low voice. “That I never meant for that evening to be the last time we saw each other. That I should have fought harder for him.” He paused, shutting his eyes, though it didn’t stop the tears leaking from beneath his eyelids. “I would tell him that if he wanted I would leave him alone forever and he had no need to forgive me but that I would love him until the end of days.”

There was a pause. “I never could stay angry at thee,” Findekáno’s voice said, with the hint of a sigh and of a smile at the same time. A hand gently stroked the center of Maedhros’s back. “Well, there will be plenty of time to be angry at thee later. Thou’rt safe, truly. Though I don’t know how long it will be before thou believe it.” He paused. “I love thee, too.”

“Finno?” Maedhros whispered.

“Yes?”

An illusion, but such a sweet one. How far could he push it? Perhaps it was not Sauron at all but a vision sent by Irmo. “Hold me?”

There was a pause and a sniff. “Of course.” Findekáno maneuvered himself over Maedhros and then his smaller body pressed up against Maedhros’s side, and he stretched out one soft black-feathered wing and covered Maedhros with it. Maedhros pressed his face into Findekáno’s shoulder. He smelled just right. He felt like everything Maedhros had ever wanted. Yes, perhaps Irmo had sent this vision.


	2. Freedom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the chapter with the smut

Maedhros’s recovery was not a quick process, not that Fingon had expected it to be. Although he hadn’t really bargained for his cousin’s stubborn insistence that the whole thing was a dream and that he would waken back in Sauron’s clutches at any minute. Not—that it was surprising, exactly. It made sense. It just also _hurt_. A frankly unutterably amount.

It was the loss of his wing that finally made him believe it, in the end. Despite the fact that the horrific injury had been cleaned and dressed as soon as Fingon had brought him back, it festered and sent Maedhros into a raving fever for three of the longest days of Fingon’s life. The healers brought him back in the end, and when he finally woke and asked what had happened, when they told him to stretch out what was left—he stared at the poor uneven ragged mess, and then he shut his eyes, and when he opened them—that queer madness had fled.

“I suppose I made quite the fool out of myself,” he said to Fingon a few weeks later, the first time he was well enough to sit outside without the healers, and they were able to be alone.

“You didn’t,” Fingon told him. “You were—” _Maitimo_ , he didn’t say. He hardly knew the hard-faced stranger sitting beside him, but then—Fingon was much changed, too, in ways he didn’t really like to think about much. None of them sat well on him. It was as if an anxious stranger occasionally took up residence in his body, one with a strong dislike of cold and ice, and simply kicked Fingon out until he was ready to be done. He sighed and shook his head. “You didn’t make a fool out of yourself, Nelyo.”

“Maedhros,” Maedhros corrected. “It’s kind of you to say so.”

Fingon rolled his eyes. “Are you trying to get me to hit you?” he demanded.

“Why would I do something like that?” Maedhros returned lightly, a momentary spark flickering in his dark eyes.

“Because you think you deserve it,” Fingon retorted, in no mood to play games. “And you _don’t_.”

Maedhros simply shrugged and went back to staring out across the darkening lake. After several minutes, he spoke again. “I probably deserve it a little.”

“Maybe,” Fingon sighed, “But as it won’t make me feel the least bit better, it would just be very self-flagellating of you, and we would both end up sulking.”

“Hm.” Another pause, and then Maedhros spoke again. “The healers are saying I need someone to massage my wings to help along the healing process. I don’t really think it’s necessary, since I certainly won’t ever be flying again—” Fingon’s heart twisted at the words, “—but they’re insisting.”

And that was a difficulty. It was an awful intimacy to permit even a healer to perform, and this was a terrible time to force Maedhros to feel any more vulnerable than he had to. If his brothers had been here, maybe one of them could have been asked, but as it was, that wasn’t an option. He made a sort of “mmm” noise to let Maedhros know he’d heard him, because he certainly didn’t have anything else clever to say.

“So I said I’d have you do it,” Maedhros went on determinedly.

“Mmhmm—wait, _what_?”

When Fingon looked over, Maedhros’s chin was trembling, almost invisibly, and he was twisting a lock of red hair around the finger of one hand. “If—if you will,” he said hoarsely. “If you’ll agree to it. Otherwise I’ll find someone else. Of course.”

“You want me to touch your wings?” Fingon echoed, his words sounding loud in his own ears.

“I know it’s—an imposition.” Maedhros huffed out his breath. “One that you’d be well within your rights to refuse, particularly seeing how I treated you at Losgar—”

“I’ll do it,” Fingon told him firmly, only partly to cut off the inevitable string of self-recriminations he didn’t want to hear any more of. It had been an impossible situation. Their lives had been nothing but a series of impossible situations since the swearing of the Oath, and Fingon found that he was very tired of taking on more painful thoughts than he needed to right now.

Maedhros eyes flicked to his, and he took in a deep, shuddering breath. “I—thank you,” he said.

“Don’t thank me,” Fingon told him. “I’m the one who cut your wing off.” He hadn’t meant to say that, and he immediately looked away. 

There was a pause, and then he felt Maedhros bending down over him, Maedhros’s own fingers kiting very lightly across the top of his wing. Fingon shivered with shock at Maedhros’s breath ghosted over his ear, and he murmured, “I suppose we’re even then. I’ll be waiting for you.”

~

What had he been _thinking_? If Findekáno—Fingon—agreed at all, it would be out of a sense of pity, and Maedhros couldn’t stand the thought of his cousin pitying him. He pressed his face into the cradle of his arms. What a fool he was. He knew what he wanted. Equally, he knew he no longer deserved it, if indeed he ever had.

“Knock knock,” Fingon’s voice said, and Maedhros looked up to see him ducking into the tent, his face open and a little hopeful. Maedhros forced himself to meet smile for smile as Fingon took a seat on the side of the bed. He knew his muscles were tensing up. He tried to pretend they weren’t. “So, um, did the healers suggest anything?” Fingon continued. “Otherwise…I can just do what Atar and Ammë did for me when I was tiny and my feathers hadn’t grown in properly.”

“They didn’t say much,” Maedhros told him hoarsely. “I don’t think it matters. Well— _I_ don’t think it will make much difference at all.”

Fingon’s chin jutted out slightly. “Shut up, Russo,” he said. “You don’t know what—”

“I know the wing isn’t going to grow back,” Maedhros cut him off. “Let’s just—get this over with.”

His cousin muttered something angry and probably very uncomplimentary under his breath, and Maedhros graciously ignored it. 

Settling himself on the bed, Fingon visibly took a deep breath and then reached out. Maedhros’s own breath caught in his throat as Fingon’s hand hovered just above his wing. “You’re really sure about this?”

“Valar, Fingon, just _do_ it.”

“All right. All right.” That little motion of his chin again. Maedhros loved it, helplessly, hopelessly. And yet the next moment it slipped out of his vision as Fingon’s hands finally sank firmly into the feathers of his wing. A little groan broke from Maedhros’s throat; his whole body shuddered. It felt—it felt like nothing he had ever imagined.

“Tell me if anything hurts, or if you want to stop,” Fingon said, from somewhere very far away. Maedhros didn’t even try to respond, because he knew whatever sound he managed to shape would be, frankly, utterly obscene. Fingon’s strong fingers teased through feathers, rubbing them against the grain at first, then rearranging and smoothing them. Every feather touched like that sent a twinge of not-quite-pain through Maedhros’s wings, like the sensation of someone tugging gently at his hair. Sauron had torn feathers out several times, but this felt nothing like that. This felt—

“Russo?”

He realized Fingon had said his name several times now. “Y-Yes? I—my apologies.”

“Can you fan your wings a little? It will help the muscles heal in the right one.”

Rather than trying to muster a smart remark, which was probably impossible in his current state, Maedhros mutely obeyed. It hurt a little, stiff muscles protesting, torn muscles—doing somewhat more than that. Also, much more noticeably to Maedhros, after a few minutes of fanning them, it increased their sensitivity—there was probably more blood flowing through them, he thought vaguely, trying to distract himself from the realization that it was _Finno’s_ touch doing this, that Finno’s hands were combing through his feathers. No one had ever touched him like this. Despite what Celegorm had told him about how it felt if it wasn’t a parent or a sibling, he had thought—well, he’d thought Tyelko was exaggerating again. In Maedhros’s defense, Tyelko exaggerated everything. Except, apparently, this.

“Are you doing all right?”

Maedhros just barely managed to nod. Warmth was blossoming in his cheeks, and he was almost certain that he was hardening. He tried not to rut into the bed. He shut his eyes again—when had he opened them? Oh, he could not do this. He shouldn’t be doing this. He shouldn’t be—here was Fingon doing him a great favor— _too_ great a favor—and he could barely breathe for the feeling of it. He bit his lip hard, but he still heard a muffled noise erupt from his throat. Fingon’s hands stilled, and it was all Maedhros could do not to beg him to keep going.

“Talk to me,” Fingon said. “Russo, what’s—”

“You should stop,” Maedhros got out harshly.

Fingon gasped and pulled back immediately, and tears pricked Maedhros’s eyes at the loss of contact. “I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

“No—no. Nothing like that. It’s just—” He needed to shut his mouth. Even though Fingon wasn’t still touching him, the feeling lingered. His muscles felt like water; waves of pleasant warmth spread through his wings, overwhelming him. 

“Am I…making you uncomfortable?” Fingon said in a low voice. “I tried to hide it, I’m sorry, it’s just—”

“What?” He rolled up on one elbow to look up at Fingon in confusion, which he realized a moment later was a mistake, because he had been pressing his face into the pillow, and he was certain he looked—he looked—well, he didn’t look the way a man receiving help from his best friend was supposed to look. 

Fingon looked the same. His grey eyes looked almost black from the dilation of his pupils, and there was a red flush rising on his cheeks. Maedhros sucked in a sudden breath, and if he hadn’t been hard before, he was hard now. He watched as Fingon bit his lip and stretched out a set of trembling fingers to brush across Maedhros’s cheeks. Three points of heat. They _burned_.

“Finno—” Maedhros murmured, and he knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help himself—he turned his face into the caress and kissed the palm of Fingon’s hand. Fingon sucked in a shaky-sounding little breath and moved his hand slightly so he was cupping Maedhros’s face. 

“ _Russo_ ,” Fingon breathed, and he delicately tipped Maedhros’s chin up. “Can I kiss you?”

Jerkily, Maedhros nodded. He wasn’t going to tell Fingon no if he wanted to. He didn’t have the willpower to do that. There might not be anyone in all of Arda with the willpower to do that. Fingon’s lips curved up in a small smile, and then he was guiding their mouths together, and Maedhros felt the warmth of his breath and then the warmth of his lips.

It was a slow kiss, one that started with the soft brush of lips and progressed only by moments into something deeper. Maedhros felt Fingon’s tongue caress his lower lip, and he groaned, opening his mouth a little, feeling Fingon doing the same. He nipped, very gently, at Fingon’s lip and got a muffled noise in response, Fingon’s hand tightening about his face, and Fingon’s other hand slipping into his feathers again. Maedhros shifted on the bed and, a moment later, found that he was clinging shamelessly to Fingon’s front. With a soft moan, Fingon moved as well, and his weight settled into Maedhros lap.

He broke the kiss to gasp, “Is this all right?” and Maedhros whined, letting his own hands slide up Fingon’s back and then, finally, sink into the downy feathers at the base of the wings where they connected with Fingon’s shoulders. “Don’t stop,” he groaned.

“Oh, _Eru_ , I didn’t know it could—feel—like— _that_ —” Fingon choked out, and he rolled his hips, grinding clumsily against Maedhros’s front.

“ _Ahhhhh_ —Fin—no—” He combed his fingers through those soft feathers, and Fingon keened and wriggled in his lap, sending waves of hard, aching, desperate pleasure through Maedhros’s straining erection.

“Yes— _yes_ —oh, Valar, _oh_ —you feel amazing—” Fingon babbled, and Maedhros leaned forward to kiss the line of his jaw and down his soft throat. The next moment Fingon’s hands were in _his_ wings, and Maedhros was the one making noise, and now Maedhros was the one who was babbling.

“Ah— _Finno—please_ —please, I need you, don’t stop, don’t ever stop—”

“No, no, I won’t, I can’t stop, I’ll die before I leave you ever again—”

Maedhros trembled at that, licking at the hollow of Fingon’s collarbone, tasting sweat and feeling heat and reminding himself that Fingon was here and safe and well. “You never left me,” he said hoarsely. “ _You_ would never.”

“Then I’ll die before you ever leave _me_ again,” Fingon said fiercely, pulling Maedhros’s head up. “Don’t you dare.”

“I won’t, I won’t, I’m never letting you go again.” He swallowed against a lump in his throat. “Finno, I am so— _so_ sorr—”

“ _Shut up_. We’re not thinking about that. We’re here. This is _now_.”

“But—” Fingon had put a hand over Maedhros’s mouth, and with his other hand, he was fumbling at the fastenings of the soft leggings beneath his tunic.

“ _No_ ,” he said, and Maedhros subsided immediately. Fingon muttered something to himself. “Don’t move,” he told Maedhros, and then he got up. “I’ll be right back,” he said in answer to the wretched sound that burst out of Maedhros’s throat at the loss of contact. “Actually—get your trousers off, too. If—do you want me?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Maedhros responded before he had a chance to think about it at all. “Always.” Clumsily, he fumbled with his lower clothing, unlacing it and kicking it off, leaving him only in his simple dark green tunic.

Fingon’s lips twitched. “Always?” he teased. “Even when I was a little one who looked up to my big cousin—”

“ _Findekáno_.”

“Well, I guess that’s still true. Not the me being little part, but the big cousin part. Here, catch.” Somehow, rusty reflexes fired and Maedhros did manage to catch the little pot of oil Fingon tossed to him. A moment later, Fingon followed it, and Maedhros found himself with a lap full of very excited Nolofinwion. It was electrifying, the contact between the two of them, now that there wasn’t anymore clothing in the way. Just the heat of Fingon’s inner thighs against his, and the sudden impossible pleasure of Fingon’s silky-smooth erection pressed right against Maedhros’s own. A wordless moan dropped from Maedhros’s mouth, and his free hand reached up to caress Fingon’s back, then dropped lower. Fingon, flushed and beautiful, grinned at him from inside his curtain of black hair.

“Give me the oil,” he said. “Or—no, wait. Put it on your fingers and put them inside me.”

Maedhros just stared at him, almost uncomprehending. Fingon was so utterly beautiful in this moment, so—almost untouchable, in his easy beauty. Nothing at all like Maedhros, with his ragged hair and body covered in crooked scars and shorn-off mess of half a wing. But he was also looking at Maedhros with such breathtaking affection—and in his hair and the feathers of his wings were still braided the thin golden cords that Maedhros had given him long ago. “Yes,” he breathed. “All right.”

He uncorked the pot and smeared a generous amount of fluid across his fingers, then slipped them behind Fingon and rubbed gingerly about the tight ring of muscle of his entrance. Fingon groaned. “Don’t _tease_ ,” he begged. “I need you inside me, Russo. I think I have needed it ever since that last night in Valinor before—before all of it.”

Eru, but Maedhros barely even remembered what he was talking about. It seemed shut away by an impossible gulf of torment and guilt, but if he tried desperately to focus he could bring to mind the silvery light of Telperion, a whispering night breeze, and Fingon’s breath on his cheek. They hadn’t admitted anything; they hadn’t spoken of feelings. They had talked of frivolous nothings, and then Fingon had fallen asleep with his head on Maedhro’s shoulder.

A little overwhelmed that Fingon still carried the memory of something so small, Maedhros kissed him gently, then slipped a finger inside before Fingon could complain again about being teased. Fingon moaned a little into his mouth, moving his hips in little round circles as Maedhros explored him. He was slick and tight and hot, and when Maedhros crooked his finger, Fingon broke the kiss to drop his head back and moan, “ _Russo_ ,” then demanded, “more, please.”

“You’re amazing,” Maedhros told him. “You are beautiful, you are magnificent, you are—” Fingon’s eyes opened to give him a pleading look and he hastily added a second finger, which Fingon ground down on with renewed fervor. 

“Stars,” he whispered, “All right, enough, I need—” He went up on his knees, angling away from Maedhros’s fingers and towards his aching erection, beating his wings slightly to steady himself.

“Oh, please,” Maedhros whispered. “Oh, Finno.”

Fingon leaned forward, his breath ghosting hot over Maedhros’s ear, just as Maedhros had done to him earlier. “You’d better plan on _screaming_ my name,” Fingon told him with an excitable grin.

“Anything you w-want, beloved,” Maedhros managed to get out as Fingon’s fingers closed around his erection and guided him carefully to his stretched, slick hole. Then his words fled entire as Fingon sank down on him. Fingon _was_ his whole world, mapped out in warm hands on his shoulders and soft lips on throat, trembling thighs on his thighs and the breath of quivering, gold-flecked black wings. Maedhros stroked his hands through those soft feathers. “You’re still wearing my ribbons, Finno,” he managed in a breathless voice as Fingon began to rock in his lap and sheer pleasure arced through every one of Maedhros’s nerve endings. “ _Ahhhhh…_ ”

“That’s because I am yours, Russo, and you are mine,” Fingon said fiercely, his words stuttering a little with the rhythm of his motions. Whimpering softly, Maedhros tried to match him, putting one hand back on the bed to steady himself, letting the other lie against the small of Fingon’s back to keep him close—or to reassure himself that his lover was there, he wasn’t sure which. His world fragmented into the sweet slick warmth of Finno, and the soft little cries that he made and the feeling of warmth unspooling lazily and wonderfully inside Maedhros’s belly and his cock. 

“Eru, yes,” he breathed, hitching his hips a little harder and drawing a moan from Fingon. “More— _yes_ —” As Fingon tipped his head back to cry out, he leaned forward and used his own arm to pull him closer to that he could run his hands through those soft and welcoming feathers again and feel the delicious heat of Fingon’s own erection trapped against his stomach. Fingon’s hands sought Maedhros’s wings again, and that was—that was—he had not even remembered such pleasure existed—perhaps he had not even known it—perhaps—“ _Finno_ , I am going to—I can’t—I can’t hold on—”

“Come inside me, love, claim me, hold me, mark me,” babbled Fingon, and Maedhros gave a breathless cry, hands twisting in soft feathers as he thrust and thrust and thrust once more, and then felt himself spill inside Fingon as the world seemed to invert in a wash of muddied colors.

When he came back to himself, he was gasping against Fingon’s shoulder, softening inside him, and Fingon was whimpering and still hard, thrusting desperately against his stomach and begging, in a muddle of almost incomprehensible Quenya, for a release. “Ah, my dearest,” Maedhros whispered softly, and he slipped a hand in between them and stroked Fingon, until he spilled over Maedhros’s fingers with another faint cry.

He took a deep, gulping breath, and then—before any of Maedhros’s insecurities could rush back in to ambush him—Fingon grabbed Maedhros’s face and kissed him, deeply, desperately, thoroughly, on the mouth.

When he pulled back, a little shakily, there was such love in his eyes that Maedhros thought he might actually die of it. “I love thee,” Fingon said, interlacing their fingers, apparently utterly concerned about the fact that Maedhros was still factually inside him and demonstrating no particular need to move.

“I love thee, too,” Maedhros responded, a little wearily. Then, with a slightly darker humor, “It appears my heart, at least, is still capable of taking flight.”

This earned him a shocked look followed by a giggle. Fingon finally peeled himself off of Maedhros. “I suppose I have given your wings the correct treatment,” he said after a moment. “Perhaps I can do it again tomorrow?”

“If you want to, you can do it again any time you please,” Maedhros told him. “Although you may have to wait a little now if you want more of this _precise_ experience.” He traced a finger over Fingon’s backside, and his lover shivered and smiled lazily. “Valar, Finno, I—” He halted, caught with the enormity of what he was feeling and the utter inadequacy of spoken words.

“You’re safe,” Fingon told him. “You’re safe, and we’re together.” He took Maedhros’s hand in his. “We will never be parted again, not as long as I live.”

Maedhros huffed a little laugh and looked away. “Difficult to promise eternal presence under such circumstances.”

“Oh, we may have to be in different places.” Fingon sat beside him and put his head on Maedhros’s shoulder, then spread his wing to cover both of Maedhros’s. The touch of wing on wing made Maedhros feel weak in the knees all over again. “But we will never be parted. Not truly.”

“That is _not_ the semantic meaning of that word,” Maedhros protested.

“You know what I mean,” Fingon said sleepily. “Isn’t that the purpose of language? To communicate?”

“The purpose of language is for thou to speak it so I can hear thy voice,” Maedhros said, his own voice cracking slightly. “I will never tire of it, not as long as _I_ live. I cannot quite believe thou art here, even now.”

“Mmmm.” Fingon curled up against his side. “Then I will have to talk until I grow hoarse, for I must make thee believe it.”

Maedhros kissed his forehead. “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, just—talk about anything. Tell me anything. I suppose I will have to find out what I have missed anyway, and I cannot think of a pleasanter way to do so than this.”

“Of course, beloved.” He paused. “Dost thou trust me? Now that thou knowest I am not some phantom of the enemy’s.”

“Yes,” Maedhros whispered. “I trust thee with my life.”

“Then look at me.” Fingon put his hand on Maedhros’s chin and turned it so that he was looking down at Fingon. “Thou art free, Russo, free and safe.”

Maedhros quivered slightly, but he nodded. “Free and safe,” he echoed in wonder. But he trusted Fingon, so it must be true. He might no longer know what freedom looked like, but it could not be so bad with Finno at his side. Nothing could be so bad when that was true.


End file.
